Why is this on privacy community?

Yep I am not using that.

this topic is especially difficult because of the clear emotional desire for it not to be true. hence the degree of fragile cope in this thread

Well said.

Thank you, will consider these options.

Yes that was the story I was referring to. It doesn’t really take that much technological effort to listen to your mic and send bits of data to server.

Bruh Brave or Vivaldi? Those are not even the best options out there

I am surprised by the response I got from majority here. I thought the people who are privacy-focused, wouldn’t give the benefit of doubt to Google of all companies. But it isn’t the case here. Everyone here just assumes and believes strongly it isn’t technically not possible which is really the case when you look at the other services offered by Google.

@op i would advise caution on stating ‘24x7’ until there is evidence of that specific claim. (unless you’re referring to while voice assistants are enabled.)

Google app which is pre-installed is pretty a forced voice assistant on everyone on android.

People saying it hurts battery usage, sends crazy amounts of network etc don’t seem to use the latest features from Google.

Now playing, Adaptive audio are some features of android system that Google has given in recent years which listen to our microphones all the time and serve their purpose. I have used them in the past, although it said it consumes battery, I never experienced huge battery brain. Google also says these services work on device and never leaves the device, but I assume extracting few words from my audio and sending them to their servers at frequent times wouldn’t be such a technically demanding process like everyone are stating here on this post. It entirely possible and probably happening.

I was in the same belief that phones do not listen to our mics for years until that news of Facebook employees leaked chat came out.

Oh I just checked, this is a lemmy.ml community.

As I have already mentioned in the post, I am not that deep into privacy rabbit hole that I am completely degoogled my life. If I did, I wouldn’t have any privacy concerns to begin with ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

On why I haven’t done it yet is simply because it is extremely hard. If you go full privacy-focused, you lose out on convience and vice versa. I’d like to stay in balance.

I will watch these later. But recently one of the Facebook’s employee’s chat was leaked saying they listen to customer mics 24/7 via a third party. Google blocked the alleged third party and Facebook has ended ties with them too.

What about it?

That’s absurd to think they link two different Google accounts and recommend stuff on YouTube. This is less believable than them listening to mic 24/7.

Also the device I pirated content on, has only one Google account registered.

There is one more thing I haven’t mentioned here. The device where I pirated the movie is different and is on different Google account and my Google account on which I opened the YouTube was different.

This is amazing. I really want to ditch Gboard. I hope this Futo can replace it completely.

Hey that’s a lot better than companies who asks you to pay and still share your data for profits

I actually liked some of the features that came with win11 but it was so bloated that it wouldn’t run that well on my old laptop.

Glad to hear that. After trying to linux and not having a great experience, I am forced to comeback to Windows. Will try these out next time.

On that note, do we have some good Windows forks/builds which remove the bloat for us? I heard about lot of them, not sure which one is actually worth trying.

Might be a dumb question but why don’t we just continue using Win10 post end of it’s support? Are security updates that necessary that the system wouldn’t work at all? As a kid I have used old Win versions like XP and 7 for a very long time, never had an issue.

Doesn’t group policy tweaks gets reverted on update or something like that? I heard about this group policy workaround and also heard something that said it wasn’t that great of a solution.